Treehuggers and treecutters unite

Small foresters in Washington get a break that might just keep them in business

Steve Stinson with a 105-year-old Douglas fir tree on his
family's property in southwestern Washington. Stinson recently
changed a harvest boundary to exclude the tree, which he's climbed
in the past

LISSA JAMES

Walking
through a 250-acre parcel of his family's land on a snowy December
morning, Steve Stinson passes from a stand of young trees into a
forest of century-old Douglas fir, their trunks rising from a
tangle of bracken fern and salal. Along the trail, Stinson points
out several snags pockmarked by the holes of pileated woodpeckers.

The Stinson family property is progressive forestry
incarnate: mixed-age forests, plenty of standing dead trees for
bird and bug habitat, and 7- to 20-acre clear-cuts replanted with a
variety of tree species. Industrial timber companies, farming trees
as if they were corn, typically harvest 38-year-old Douglas fir
monocrops; the Stinsons don't cut until their trees are 80 years
old. The family owns nearly 1,200 acres in southwestern
Washington's Lewis County, making it a "small forest landowner"
under Washington state law.

Small tree farms like the
Stinsons' encompass some of the most environmentally sensitive land
in the state: low-lying areas close to streams and rivers. But
rising property values and stagnating timber prices often tempt
these landowners to sell out, opening their land to the subdivision
knife. And small foresters are hampered by environmental
restrictions originally designed to help the timber industry
navigate the Endangered Species Act.

Now, the threat of
forests disappearing under exurbia has brought some traditional
adversaries - environmentalists and the small foresters - to the
same table. Together, they've succeeded in convincing the state
Legislature to tinker with the regulations in a way that could help
keep the foresters on the land. But as the foresters ask for more,
the environmentalists are beginning to have doubts.

The problem surfaced in 1999, when it became
clear that a landmark rule designed to protect endangered salmon
habitat would have a significant economic impact on small tree
farms. The Forests and Fish Rules, which will regulate logging on
private land in Washington until 2055, give the timber industry
immunity from lawsuits over damage done by logging to endangered
salmon habitat. In exchange, loggers must increase the size of the
buffer zones they leave around fish-bearing streams. But because
small landowners are more likely to own land in easy-to-access
river valleys, the new streamside regulation hit them harder than
it did the industrial companies, which mainly own land in the
foothills.

Up until last September, small landowners had
to file Forest and Fish permit applications every two years. Since
few small landowners are well-versed in the scientific side of
forestry, they had to hire consultants to fill out the hefty
applications. That could cost thousands of dollars, and more if
streams, new roads, or threatened or endangered species were
involved, says forester Jack Kleinhoff. Now, thanks to the recent
push in the Legislature, small landowners only have to apply every
15 years - a seemingly small change that has some wide-ranging
repercussions. It gives those landowners one less barrier to
staying in business, and regulators hope that taking the long view
will help them do a better job managing their forests. "We want
people to think, 'Do I want that road for just one harvest, or is
it in the proper location to be able to access many harvest
locations?' " says Mary McDonald, manager of the state's Small
Forest Landowner Office. Rick Dunning, executive director of the
Washington Farm Forestry Association, hopes that hundreds of
long-term permits will be approved this year.

Small
landowners first started working on the long-term permits in 2002,
but the plan picked up momentum when the environmentalists got on
board. "Our support (for the long-term permits) is what gave them a
green light," says Peter Goldman, executive director of the
Washington Forest Law Center. The state's environmentalists, says
Goldman, "all want to see small forest landowners succeed and be
able to conduct viable forestry." That's a big change from 10 years
ago, says Rick Dunning, when "environmentalists didn't want us to
cut a tree."

The treatybetween
landowners and environmentalists, however, has hit a snag as
foresters look for more regulatory leniency. In addition to
managing his family's property, Steve Stinson is the executive
director of the Family Forest Foundation, which has spent 10 years
and nearly $4 million of private, state and federal funding
developing the nation's first multi-species, multi-landowner
Habitat Conservation Plan. If approved by the federal government,
the plan would allow landowners on 130,000 acres in Lewis County to
harvest more trees next to streams, but increase the restrictions
on upland logging. So far, says Stinson, the support from the
environmental community for the new plan has been "tepid." "The
naysayers," he says, "worry this will unravel Forests and Fish."

And it might not do any good, anyway. Becky Kelley,
campaign director for the Washington Environmental Council, says
it's too simplistic to blame the regulations when land is converted
from forestry to development. The average small-forest landowner is
in his 60s, looking ahead to retirement, estate taxes and health
care bills. "The conversation that doesn't happen," says Kelley,
"is, 'Aren't they going to convert anyway? And how can we address
these other problems?' "

The cooperation that went into
the long-term permits, says Kirk Hanson, regional director for
Northwest Certified Forestry, "may have just been a flash in the
pan." But the pressure on the area's forests is bound to increase:
The population of the Puget Sound region is expected to grow by
half again by 2040. Environmentalists and small landowners "will
end up on the same page someday," says Rick Dunning, "because we
both want the same things."

For a look at what both sides
don't want, one need only make the short drive from the Stinson
family forest to Chehalis, Wash., where, says Stinson, "they're
paving over the floodplain." Indeed, in December, as major floods
washed across the region, the Chehalis Wal-Mart made regional news:
It ended up 10 feet underwater.

The author
writes from Lilliwaup, Washington, where her family owns a tree
farm.